The present invention relates to an information recording apparatus that is capable of recording a voice associated with the location and time of voice utterance (speech utterance).
Conventional automobile navigation systems provide the travel position of the vehicle to the driver by presenting a map of the surroundings and provide guidance on the route to the desired destination in accordance with information regarding the current location of the vehicle received by a GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver. The navigation system is provided with a display device for presenting a map of the vehicle surroundings.
Such navigation systems are provided with a variety of capabilities. For example, the user can pre-register a desired location to display a map of surroundings of the location readily with the push of a button. In addition, with a simple push of a button, the user can set the location to a destination, allowing the navigation system to provide the route to the destination. In a navigation system having such capabilities, a key entry system is employed to input a location and the characters indicative of the location. For example, when the user has found a favorite shop, the user can input the name of the shop or the like by text, so that the user can confirm the location of the shop on a map or the navigation system can provide the information on the route to the shop when the user wants to revisit the shop afterwards.
On the other hand, some navigation systems designed for home delivery service or collection and delivery service can record the time of visit to each home as well as a selection of the purpose of visit or the like in a pre-registered list. The user can use these capabilities to keep logs of his or her job with the navigation system. On the other hand, some other navigation systems retrieve data provided by various sensors located inside the vehicle and then store the data as history data, which the user can use for the purpose of operation management of the vehicle.
However, the aforementioned prior art presents the following disadvantages. For example, when the user registers a favorite location, the user has to identify the location with a limited number of characters. To register a shop, the user is allowed to input, e.g., only the name and type of the shop. In other words, since the user cannot store details about the registered location in the navigation system, the user may not be able to recall the nature of a registered location at a later time.
Furthermore, with the aforementioned navigation system for business use, the key entry system allows the user to only select an appropriate purpose of visit from a classified list and record it. Thus, to record detailed purposes of visits to prepare a job log, the user has to take hand-written notes of the details in a notebook.
Furthermore, since the user has to touch keys to use the aforementioned capabilities of the navigation system, it is necessary to stop the vehicle to record the desired information in the navigation system.
In addition, since the data provided by each sensor located inside the vehicle can be automatically recorded but indicates only those events related to the running conditions of the vehicle, the user cannot record detailed events that are caused by human factors.